The British psychiatrist, neuroscientist and mystic Iain McGilchrist ties almost every political, religious and philosophical issue to his left-and-right-sides-of-the- brain research. In almost every interview, McGilchrist brings this subject up. Is this a classic case of someone seeing the world through the lens of his own personal specialisation?
This essay focuses on an interview with Iain McGilchrist carried out by Unherd’s Freddie Sayers. (It can be found on YouTube under the title ‘Iain McGilchrist: How to escape left-brain thinking’.) So rather than introduce McGilchrist myself, I’ll let Sayers do so instead:
“McGilchrist is one of our favorite thinkers here at Unherd. He’s a neuroscientist, a philosopher, a writer. Unherd itself tells us about McGilchrist’s ‘central theory of the bihemispheric brain, the divided brain’, and how each of the two parts of our brain thinks differently about the world, and how if we understand that, we can better understand how humans think. And now Iain is one of the biggest names both on the internet and on the lecture circuit and all around the world.”
McGilchrist Is a Man With a Hammer
Arguably, all McGilchrist has done is add some science to various mystical traditions. More concretely, he adds talk about the right and left hemispheres of the brain into the mystical melting pot.
Is this an attempt to naturalise mysticism?
No one would deny that there is solid neuroscience on hemispheric differences. However, when McGilchrist talks about civilisation being “left-hemisphere dominated”, he’s no longer doing neuroscience or any form of science. Perhaps he would admit this.
It’s clear that McGilchrist has a hammer because he’s spent decades developing and using it. His hammer is now part of his intellectual identity.
As for the phrase “a man with a hammer” itself. These five words come from the psychologist (ironically) Abraham Maslow, who wrote: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
Like the reductionist Donald Hoffman reducing everything down to conscious agents (or, more broadly, to consciousness itself), McGilchrist reduces everything down to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Of course, both will say that they aren’t doing that at all, or that it ain’t that simple. But those they class as “reductionist” or “materialist” can justifiably claim something similar too!
Taking on Left-Brained Pinker and Dawkins
Let’s not play down what McGilchrist is attempting to do. Take his words here:
“I’m prepared to stick my neck out and say that if enough people, and it might only be 2% of the population, started to think like this and talk like this, that we could see things turn around in a matter of a decade. And maybe we haven’t got a decade, but I’m hoping that we have that in a decade’s time, there would be distinct differences in the way public discourse went on, a sophistication of the way that people talk about what we are, what we’re doing here, what the world is, way beyond the Pinker and the Dawkinsian bankrupt vision of simply random movement of meaningless matter.”
That’s rhetoric. McGilchrist may say it’s literally true. But let me rewrite it:
I’m prepared to stick my neck out and say that if enough people, and it might only be 2% of the population, started to think like I think and talk like I talk, that we could see things turn around in a matter of a decade.
This reads like a political manifesto. McGilchrist has even done some calculations and come to the conclusion that if only 2% of the population came to think and talk as he does… then what, exactly, will follow?
McGilchrist’s mystical and religious trajectory was set early in his life, at least according to himself. He states the following in the interview:
“When I was in my teens, I imagined that after a spell at Oxford [University], I would go into a monastery because it seemed so important to me to devote myself to understanding these truths that seem to me the most profound truths [ ].”
Personally, I become suspicious when people use the word “profound”, “deep”, etc. This is especially the case when they’re talking about what they themselves are doing. In basic terms, McGilchrist is saying that it is he who is offering people profound truths.
In any case, it doesn’t take long for McGilchrist to wield his hammer in the interview:
“The left hemisphere on its own is prone to delusion. And I don’t just mean in the popular parliament’s idea of a delusion. I mean technically whatever you think of a civilization when it collapses all kinds of unbelievable evils will follow.”
Mystical Right-Brained Apophatic Thinking
McGilchrist focusses a lot on apophatic thinking. This is him explaining what that is:
“Now that idea of a process that is getting nearer and of clearing away things that are untrue [ ]. It is apophatic. I mean people like Pinker and Dawkins would throw a wobbly if I said that because they don’t understand what’s meant by the apophatic path towards the divine. In other words, the clearing away of what is not true in order to allow what is there to shine forth.”
I’m not entirely sure what the words “a process that is getting nearer and clearing away things that are untrue” mean. Or, rather, I am, but I don’t understand why they are profound. I certainly don’t understand why they have anything to do with Pinker and Dawkins.
Do they understand apophatic thinking? I have no idea. Should they understand it?
Myths Are False But Holy
McGilchrist talks about myths in the following:
“I think this tells us about the nature of myths that are really important elements that cannot be looked at in that dissecting denotative frame of mind, [and] that we need to be clear about this. In other words, Dawkins’s frame of mind that ‘let’s get the facts right’. ‘Was there really this person?’, and so on.”
That’s supposedly Richard Dawkins’ position. This is McGilchrist’s own position:
“It doesn’t matter whether there really was this person because this story is completely independent of that. [ ] I saw a clip of Dawkins talking to Jordan Peterson. It was most unenlightening because Dawkins kept saying, ‘Well, you know, did the Virgin Mary actually lie with a man or was this actually a virgin birth?’ And Peterson didn’t want to say yes or no really. And I understand why because he was staying on a vision of what is true that didn’t depend on the facts of the case.”
Most Catholics do believe in the Virgin Birth. It’s not a myth to them. It is a myth to Iain McGilchrist.
It’s very evident that a story has an existence and role regardless of whether the characters and events in it existed and occurred. Again, why would Dawkins deny this? Surely, Dawkins’ point is that many people actually believe that these people existed and that the claims are true. They haven’t always got the deep and profound minds of people like McGilchrist. In addition, why would Dawkins need to deny that a story may still have a message without it being about real people and real events?
In detail, McGilchrist resurrects the Noble Lie in the following passage:
“[I]ncluding things that were literally or factually untrue and still end up in some closer to truth than someone who rejected the whole story outright. And [Dawkins] completely just didn’t come with me on that concept.”
Okay. Let’s be clear here. Even if a belief in “things that were literally or factually untrue” can have positive consequences, why would Dawkins deny that? He probably doesn’t. But McGilchrist must be honest here. He must state something like the following:
Many of the things that religious and other people deem to be true are not true. However, it is beneficial to believe in these things.
This stance goes back to Plato’s Noble Lie, Marx’s “the point isn’t to interpret the world but to change it”, and even to the pragmatism of William James.
William James and John Searle
Take William James’s popular book, Varieties of Religious Experience. It can be said that James was a kind of early language-games theorist. Indeed, James was well known for his idea of “the will to believe” too. This doctrine — according to certain commentators at least — states (to put it simply, though accurately) that if a myth or religious belief works for you (or works for a community as a whole), then why not adopt it? It doesn’t matter if one’s beliefs are true or whether they correspond to anything outside the actual language game. What matters are the pragmatic effects of myths and religious beliefs. In fact, according to James’s liberal pragmatism (unlike, say, C. S. Peirce’s), a belief is actually made true if and when it works. (I strongly suspect that many experts on James will see this as a simplification of James’s position.)
Now for John Searle’s views on these same matters.
The American philosopher John Searle believed that the majority of people within religious language games won’t — or even couldn’t — accept the nonrealist attitude of people like McGilchrist. Searle writes:
“[W]hether or not there is a God listening to their prayer isn’t itself part of the language game. The reason people play the language game of religion is because they think there is something outside the language game that gives it a point.”
Of course, we can ask here (in a Searlian spirit) whether the very concept of (realist) truth has any real purchase in some (or all) of these disparate language games.
Searle’s point, however, is that Wittgenstein’s liberalism (if that’s what it was) towards religious language games may not, in actual fact, have been much appreciated by the actual religious participants in these language games. That is, if they ever came to know that McGilchrist believes that such games are completely autonomous creations (or constructions), then they might not have accepted that their own particular religious practices are in fact language games at all.
Unherd Defends Pinker and Dawkins
It was up to Unherd’s Freddie Sayers to put Dawkins’ and Pinker’s views. That’s because McGilchrist didn’t even try to do so. Sayers states the following:
“To be fair, both Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker are people who can talk lyrically about music, love and the kind of non-logical aspects of life. It’s not like they are blind to them, but I think their anxiety if they were listening to this conversation, and from the kind of worldview you have, might be that the gains of the enlightenment, the advances we have made from our emphasis on rationality and logic, are in danger at the moment anyway by a kind of regression of science, an increase of dangerous superstition, and people like Iain McGilchrist going off on YouTube telling people that it’s okay to believe myths even if they’re not really literally true is only encouraging this dangerous tendency and they probably quite anxious about it. What would you say back to them?”
McGilchrist responded:
“Well, I would say gosh, as I find myself saying almost in everything that I have to talk about, truths are not of the kind that you think 100% it’s this. There are a number of different truths and they need to be in order to be have an intelligent understanding let alone to approach wisdom one needs to be able to hold them and not lose one because you hold to another. [ ] Extolling these as very important ways of arriving at an understanding of the world but not on their own. They need supplementation by two other paths intuition and imagination.”
Most of that I don’t understand. And what I do understand has been said many times before in various mystical traditions. McGilchrist’s emphasis on intuition is very rationalist, and can also be very dangerous (think of the Nazis and Heidegger). The passage above also includes an indirect reference to McGilchrist’s hammer again. After all, it’s the right hemisphere that’s the domain of intuition and imagination.
Note:
Here are two other mentions of Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins by Iain McGilchrist in the same interview:
“The trouble with Pinker and Dawkins is that they are biologists, and biologists until recently have been very much mechanists. Thank God that is now passing.”
And:
“[W]hen we’re not aware of things, and I’m afraid Dawkins and Pinker and Co. appear not to be aware of certain things, then you tend to adopt positions that are only partially true. [they] think of us as lumbering robots doing the bidding of our genes.”
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